Increase Your Inside Sales Rep’s Daily Productivity

We are proud to introduce InsightSquared’s VP of Sales Jason Coville and his first contribution to InsightSquared’s blog. Look for more entries from Jason on sales best practices and inside looks into the InsightSquared sales team. Jason joined us in June 2012 and has 12+ years of sales and inside sales experience.

Noise means inefficiency in sales analytics. The “noise” I am referring to is when sales reps don’t have a plan to start the day and meander through Salesforce.com searching aimlessly for leads or opportunities to contact. Efficient sales teams remove noise from their workflow. Your sales team will unintentionally waste time without a clear direction, so it’s critical for a sales leader to put the right structures in place so reps can quickly identify and follow up with valuable leads and opportunities.

It begins with a nightly sales e-mail.

Here’s a tip for inside sales: The typical workflows of our reps starts with the nightly and weekly emails InsightSquared sends to all it’s customers. Before they even set foot into the office, the entire team knows exactly how their recent performance stacks up. These emails are an awesome and easy motivational driver to increase sales activities.

As soon as you walk in the office.

Once our reps arrive at the office, the next step is to log into InsightSquared and review the activities for that day, like demos or trial kickoffs scheduled. This first step guides the reps behavior throughout the day.

One dashboard I recommend our reps review every morning when they first sit down is our Closing Opportunities dashboard. It’s possible to create your own opportunity dashboard in Excel, but not a trivial task with your Salesforce.com data. Here reps review opportunities closing within the month and make sure they are on top of their most valuable deals. Reps are also looking for data quality errors, like a close date is in the past or fat finger on the opportunity amount field in Salesforce.com.

Once your plate is clean.

The next priority for reps at InsightSquared is to pick up the phone and make their dials, picking up leads from the queue built off our marketing campaigns. Marketing and sales are constantly working together to provide quality leads and watch them convert to opportunities. Our inside sales reps have a sense of ownership over leads based on their territory.

Wrapping up the day.

Reps close the day with a nightly review of their activity goals. Each person can see how they compare against other members of the team or their own personal bests over previous time periods. This transparency builds healthy competition on the team and within the individual.

Prioritizing activities in the daily workflow is easy to manage when the right infrastructure is in place. Empower your sales team to easily manage their daily workflow so they close deals more efficiently.

Want to make it simple for everyone in your sales organization to explore their Salesforce.com data?